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te so easily, had he been aware that Col. Bancker had announced his intention of being at the house in the evening (as _he_ had not), and that Emily had begged her aunt to come down from her room and sit with her in the parlor, on purpose to prevent the expected Colonel having an opportunity for one word with her in private. But these men are so unreasonable as well as so blind! There is no satisfying them, especially with the amount of attention shown them by a woman whom they happen to fancy that they love. Perhaps men do not grow actually jealous any more easily than women, but they grow "miffed" and "hurt" a thousand times easier--let the fact be recorded. There is one instance on legendary record, of a woman who divided her husband with another, at the time of the chivalrous adventures of the Crusaders; but the instance has not yet come to light of the man who so divided his _wife_. Mormonism at the present day shows the pitch even of fanatical tolerance to which the female mind can be wrought in this direction; while we have yet to look for the corresponding instance on the other side, in which the women of a community appropriate to themselves half a dozen or fifty husbands each, and the men consent to the division. This difference goes much farther even than the regulation (can such a thing be regulated?) of jealousy. Where no jealousy exists, exclusiveness and the sense of propriety comes into the account--again on the male side of the calculation. Jones and his wife being both wall-flowers at any evening party, Mrs. Jones did not feel aggrieved, but rather proud, at Mrs. Thompson's re-union, that Jones went off for an hour to pay the usual flirting attention to the wives of half a dozen of his acquaintances; while Jones colored to the eyes and could scarcely be restrained from making a fool of himself, because Robinson sat down in the vacant chair beside his wife, and tried to be agreeable. And when the Emperor and Lady Flora were at Niagara last summer, it is not upon record that the lady made any objection to the gentleman lingering an hour too late upon Goat Island with that blonde-haired English girl who was such an unmistakeable flirt,--while the gentleman went on like a madman on the balcony of the Cataract, because Lady Flora ran away for half an hour in broad daylight, to Prospect Point, with an old friend of her father's, _oelat_ fifty and incurably an invalid. Ah, well--so it has been from the days o
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